“E-books that expire like the meat in youre fridge whats next”?

To pay or not to pay for a DRM copy­right pro­tected e-book, that is the ques­tion today. I decided to buy a cou­ple of e-books today, instead of buy­ing paper back like I usu­ally do, in an effort to save the freak­ing trees and some money as well “ you know we are in a reces­sion”. Well, it’s safe to say my lit­tle e-book pur­chase didn’t go as planned. I did do quite a bit of com­par­ing, before I decided on whom to buy from; how­ever the mis­take I made, was for­get­ting to read the fine print and more impor­tantly the F.A.Q’s. Most web­sites, list many of their traps right in their FAQS, if you can’t stand read­ing their tiny lit­tle poli­cies that they bury some­where in there webpage’s, make sure you read their stu­pid F.A.Q’s.

I pur­chased the E-books from MBS Direct, I thought they were kind of expen­sive, how­ever I thought they were the best choice; as I am severely weary of pur­chas­ing used online books at fly by night e– stores that are unknown, or sites such as Ama­zon that re-sell oth­ers crap. For some rea­son I don’t quite trust Ama­zon, and I will never ever buy any­thing off of E-bay, let’s just say I know some peo­ple who sell stuff on e-bay and Ama­zon and they aren’t exactly cus­tomer ser­vice type dri­ven entre­pre­neurs. They are there to sell you there junk and you are there to pay 3 times the amount of what it orig­i­nally cost, when they first obtained or bought the junk.

So you can see my dilemma here. I bought the books for a reli­able source so I thought; I have been pur­chas­ing paper­back books from them for over a year. It is safe to say that I was a very happy cus­tomer, other than the fact that I felt they over charged for ship­ping– but that was cool with me, we know every­body does It, “you know who you are”. So I didn’t think my expe­ri­ence with pur­chas­ing an e-book would be any dif­fer­ent. I was actu­ally kind of excited because I wouldn’t have to pay the over­priced ship­ping any longer. I was sur­prised to learn that the hard­cover books and the e-books were prac­ti­cal the same price, this came as a shock to me. You would think since there is not cost in pro­duc­ing an e-book or dis­trib­ut­ing it that it would likely be less expen­sive. But sadly this was not the case. I shrugged and decided to go on with my pur­chase any­ways. After mak­ing my pur­chase I did not receive an instant down­load as expected.

I became extremely frus­trated at this point, nod­ding my head in dis­con­tent. I decided to find out what the hell was going on with my freak­ing e-books. I called cus­tomer ser­vice and spoke with a lovely oper­a­tor named Shelly, who told me that I needed to down­load a spe­cial soft­ware to review the e-book. I was not too happy to hear, that I could not use the e-books directly that I paid $180.00 for. I think that’s absolutely ridicu­lous, to pay that much money for an e-book and not be able to use it as you please. You wouldn’t buy a hard book that was locked in a case attached to your book­shelf that only you could access via fin­ger print scan soft­ware. Your hard book library isn’t under tight lock and key and you can lend, sell, or copy your hard books as you see fit. So why give con­sumers the has­sles of high secu­rity mea­sures and down­load­ing stu­pid soft­ware to run their e-books? After all there’s absolutely no cost in repro­duc­ing an e-book — is my sar­casm paint­ing the pic­ture for you? If you have any imag­i­na­tion at all you can see that I’m slowly run­ning out of patience, becom­ing less con­cerned about the envi­ron­ment and ques­tion­ing whether or not how this is legal and won­der­ing why some smarty pants up on capi­tol hill hasn’t started some bill or peti­tion to pre­vent the DRM from hav­ing this much con­trol over mate­ri­als con­sumers legalally pur­chased. You want my opin­ion! I think it’s com­pletely uneth­i­cal, it evades our pri­vacy and is a direct vio­la­tion of our rights as consumers.

Now to tell you the worse part… After being forced to down­load some crappy soft­ware, that is good for noth­ing –its only use is to hog a good por­tion of my mem­ory just so I can read 2 e-books. That is absolutely the stu­pid­est thing I’ve ever heard of. As I’m get­ting the soft­ware loaded up and know it tells me the book is only valid for 180 days. I’m floored WTF!!!! I JUST PAID 180.00 FOR 2 E-BOOKS THAT I CAN ONLY USE FOR 180.00 DAYS! ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME? I don’t think so, I called cus­tomer ser­vice and gave them a piece of my mind and told them that I would never order a damn thing from them again. I also asked the rep who the hell would be stu­pid enough to pay 180.00 for 2 e-books that they can’t even keep. The hard cov­ered books were about the same price in fact they sold them cheaper on Ama­zon, even some new books that haven’t even been opened. I under­stand why peo­ple devote their time to crack­ing soft­ware and pirat­ing media. It’s not the con­sumers who are screw­ing the media com­pa­nies. It’s the media com­pa­nies screw­ing the con­sumers. I have decided to bor­row the e-books I was going to pur­chase from some­one else. I am not going to pay 180.00 for some­thing I can’t keep, so just put that in your back pocket. I think the DRM thinks were stu­pid or some­thing, you’d have to be, to pay that much money for a cou­ple of e-books that expire like meat in your fridge.

Other related articles:

How to remove DRM from iTunes, WMV, WMA and con­vert unpro­tected media files?
The Cus­tomer Is Always Wrong: A User’s Guide to DRM in Online Music
How to burn or crack pro­tected WMA files?
eBook — Hack­ing — How to Crack Any Soft­ware Pro­tec­tion
The Best 6 Sites to Get Free Ebooks
20 best web­sites to down­load free e-books

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